There’s a new version of a tool described as pastebin for SQL. Dataclips 2.0 adds the ability to fork your dataclips, to control access granularly, and to create dashboards to make it easier to browse dataclips.

Dataclips has been developed by Heroku Postgres (https://postgres.heroku.com/), best known for providing the Postrgres SQL database as a service, to allow the results of SQL queries on a Heroku Postgres database to be easily shared.

The team at Heroku Postgres says they believe data should flow like water, and that you should be able to move data smoothly between apps, teams and services.

In practical terms Dataclips is a tool for sharing live query results where you define a dataclip as a sharable handle to a live query. Under the covers the dataclip is presented as an unguessable URL that you can email, tweak, or embed in something such as a spreadsheet. The recipients of a data clip are able to view the data in their browser or download it in JSON, CSV, XML, or Microsoft Excel formats.

The new version adds the ability to fork dataclips. Forking creates a new dataclip with a new URL that you can then modify. Your original dataclip still exists and will continue to be available at its original URL. The new tool makes it easier to update dataclips, so if you modify the query a dataclip runs, it will maintain its URL but changes will appear to those who access the clip. Dataclips 2.0 also adds a new dashboard that you can use to search clips by author, database, or name.

Another improvement to the new version is granular access control for dataclips. The previous version of dataclips used unique URLs as the security technique. Version 2.0 has added the ability to secure dataclips to specific Heroku accounts, and to securely grant or remove access to data without requiring you to recreate dataclips when access requirements change.

The final main improvement to the new release is the ability to embed dataclips directly into spreadsheets and into Google Docs and have them kept in sync.

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